


And the Birthday Dessert Conundrum

by lady_ragnell



Category: 2 Broke Girls
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, F/F, Femslash February, Food, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 10:36:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caroline is not the baker in their duo, but Max deserves something special for her birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Birthday Dessert Conundrum

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "food porn" square on my Trope Bingo card.

Caroline is determined to make Max’s birthday awesome. Max, after all, did her best for Caroline’s.

Okay, she threw the worst party known to man, got them thrown out of jail (Caroline is still not totally sure on how people get _thrown out of jail_ but it’s Max so she really shouldn’t have been surprised), and bought an ice cream cake on the way home, but it’s the thought that counts. And Max may say (a lot, she says it a lot, Caroline’s pretty sure her old therapist would say things about abandonment issues) that she wasn’t trying, but she was. So Caroline is going to try.

A party is not going to happen. Not when they’re still trying to get _Max’s Homemade Cupcakes_ off the ground, not when Earl is pretty much the only one Max would accept a party from anyway. Caroline gives some serious thought to delving into emergency funds and buying Max a stripper, but then she figures Sophie would just come downstairs and they’d never see him again and Oleg would look mildly traumatized for the next week or so and nope, Caroline is just … not going to go there. She hears plenty through the floor, she does not need to hear that.

The obvious solution is to bake her a dessert and buy her a present, but Max is the baker. Caroline isn’t going to try to make her cupcakes even if she’s getting a little better at assisting with those. They’re both a little sick of them anyway, except when Max comes up with a new flavor, and Caroline is not going to experiment with flavors. She could make a cake, but basically that’s just a big cupcake, and again, not going there.

There is a whole world of other desserts out there. Caroline knows this. She has had the finest tiramisu, cheesecake, chocolate confections, handmade marzipan, tartlets and pies and meringues and even Turkish delight at her eighth birthday party when she decided she wanted a Narnia theme and there was a real lion. (Caroline thinks on reflection that maybe she didn’t have the most normal childhood. But Max didn’t really either.) The problem with all of those is that they’re hard. Caroline is still getting used to the microwave, pie crust seems a little ambitious, and looking at the candy recipes makes her want to cry a little (and think about calling Andy, but he’s already pretty convinced she’s gay for Max and asking him to help her make caramels for Max’s birthday seems a little too much like confirmation when she hasn’t even confirmed it to _herself_ yet. She’s a little paranoid with the shower head these days).

So she goes looking for easy desserts: cookies don’t seem birthdayish enough, brownies are a possibility, lemon squares are delicious but she thinks Max would rather have chocolate, strawberry shortcake would be delicious except then Caroline looks at the price of strawberries and decides maybe not. Brownies it is, then. Maybe with ice cream and fixings, Max can make banana split jokes.

Brownies, Caroline discovers with a sinking feeling approximately two minutes after she makes the decision, are not as simple as she thought they were going to be. There isn’t just one recipe that everyone seems to basically follow like there is with chocolate chip cookies, there are a million and everyone disagrees on which one is the best. There are brownies with every flavoring known to man. There are cheesecake brownies. There are white chocolate brownies. There are brownies without nuts and with nuts, with and without frosting. There are brownies that _use raw cookie dough as icing_ which Caroline is pretty sure is some kind of dessert incest. She is also pretty sure she would never stop eating them, which makes them the _Game of Thrones_ of desserts. Or the House Lannister of desserts.

Caroline gets lost in Pinterest, which is the inevitable conclusion of any search for dessert recipes. All roads lead to Pinterest. Even the roads that start with the search term “dessert incest” and Caroline should really know how to Google better than that.

It takes five sneaky Google/Pinterest sessions, eight attempts to ask any of their friends how to make brownies (Oleg gives her dental dams (why does Oleg have dental dams, Caroline does not want to know but the question is going to keep her up at night), Sophie says “oh, _brownies_ , wink wink, you and Max will have such a good time!”, Han looks pained and asks why she doesn’t just make cupcakes, and Earl gives her a recipe for hash brownies and says, when she asks how they taste, that it doesn’t really matter because everything will taste amazing about ten minutes after eating them), at least a hundred reminders to herself that brownie mix is probably cheating, and a lot of suspicious looks from Max before she finds a recipe that most people agree is “moist and delicious.” So even if they come out wrong Max will get a kick out of the reviews.

Caroline makes a test batch a few days before Max’s birthday and they come out okay, so she gives them away (mostly to Sophie, who doesn’t seem very happy with them in place of her usual cupcakes but says that she’ll pass them on to her girls) and prepares for the day itself.

Preparing, she admits, mostly consists of pretending that people are under-tipping her for about a week and then wandering around Williamsburg wondering what Max wants for her birthday (without asking her, because asking Max what kinds of presents she wants mostly leads to her talking about prostitutes and Johnny and really, maybe Caroline should just give her a gift certificate to a sex shop. The downside to this would be actually going to a sex shop). She discards weed, anything cooking-related, and … pretty much everything, actually. Which, in the end and after a weak moment, leads to Caroline standing at the counter of Condom Sense asking them for a twenty-dollar gift certificate and trying not to make eye contact with the guy behind the counter.

“Lesbian!” she blurts the third time he says something really horrifying, and that gets him off her back but also gets her an announcement that they’re having a two-for-one sale for strap-on harnesses.

Caroline puts the whole thing out of her mind and shoves the envelope into her purse where Max hopefully won’t find it.

Max’s birthday arrives while they’re on shift at the diner, since they have the night shift, after all, and Earl and Sophie lead the customers in a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” where nobody sings the same lyrics and Max mostly looks pained. Caroline sings along and takes the tables with the more annoying hipsters, and when she and Max get home she shoos Max off to get some sleep—Han and Oleg’s birthday present to Max was to take a shift in the cupcake shop so Max and Caroline don’t have to open it today, which Caroline probably shouldn’t have allowed, but … Max got felt up by jail wardens for Caroline’s birthday, she can take a day off work.

Once Max is safely snoring in bed (and she does snore, which she never ever admits to), Caroline gets out the baking ingredients she’s been stockpiling in the cabinet with the Tupperware Max never uses. Cocoa, chocolate chips, sugar and flour and milk and eggs from the store they keep for cupcakes, everything she needs.

When Max bakes, she never seems to need to measure anything, probably because of how much she does it. There are measuring cups, though, thank God, and Caroline keeps every measurement as exact as she can. She loses a little eggshell in the batter (though it does eventually come out), gets cocoa powder all over the counter, and is pretty sure she’s a complete mess by the time she gets them in the oven, but she does get them in the oven, so she’s not going to be too picky about it.

Caroline even cleans up the kitchen after she’s finished, which she definitely deserves extra best friend points for. The apartment is starting to smell like brownies, and Caroline hovers over the oven, sticking a toothpick into the center of the pan every thirty seconds once the recipe says they might conceivably done. Max would mock if she were awake, but Max is still snoring in the next room and Caroline is going to make these brownies as delicious as possible without actually making them illegal.

The brownies are barely out of the oven before Caroline realizes she totally forgot about ice cream. She leaves them on the counter and makes sure the door is locked so Chestnut won’t break in and eat them before running out to the nearest 24-hour store, since it’s still early. She’s barely going to get any sleep at all before she takes Max her breakfast of brownies in bed.

The store doesn’t have a lot of ice cream, but Caroline buys a tub of vanilla and one of chocolate and a lot of toppings, from caramel to butterscotch to whipped cream to maraschino cherries. The clerk raises weary eyebrows at Caroline when she goes to pay (and has to dig a few quarters out of the bottom of her purse to pay for everything) and then looks intrigued when the sex shop certificate spills out onto the counter. Caroline stuffs it back in her purse and tries not to blush as she takes her bag and the wink she gets from the clerk on her way out.

When she gets back to the apartment, Max is sitting on the counter in a t-shirt and boxers that Caroline is pretty sure used to belong to Andy (as always, Caroline decides not to ask) with a fork in the middle of the tray of brownies. “You’re awake!” Caroline says. Shrieks, maybe. She’s a little surprised, what can she say?

“I smelled the brownies, thought I was sleep baking.” Max takes another forkful. “But nope, but brownie fairies must have come again, damn those little bastards are sneaky.”

“Those are your birthday dessert! I was going to bring them to you in bed!” She lifts her bag of ice cream. “With ice cream!”

“Ice cream?” Max’s eyebrows go up. “Pull up a seat, I’ll even let you have some of these brownies.”

Caroline isn’t expecting a thank you or acknowledgment that the brownies are good (which, she thinks smugly when she takes a spoon and tries a bite, they actually are), but that’s about as good as Max ever gets, so she decides not to mind. Instead, she dishes out ice cream for both of them under Max’s direction, with Max predictably making comments about the lack of bananas.

It’s five in the morning and Caroline is pretty sure she’s running on fumes and cocoa dust by now, but she’s not about to call a stop to anything even if she would rather Max had slept for a few more hours. Instead, she declares it the official birthday celebration, a little late, and hands the certificate over too, playing along when Max ribs her about spicing up their sex life.

They both pass out after half an hour of gorging themselves on desserts, both of them in Caroline’s bed because Max declares herself too tired to open doors. There’s ice cream melting on the counter and a few square inches of brownie left in the pan, but Caroline doesn’t care either. She wakes up at noon with Max’s hair in her mouth and Chestnut (who can apparently break locks now) slurping happily at a sea of ice cream soup on the counter. At least they managed to put most of it away, just not their half-finished bowls.

Later, Max insists on going to Condom Sense with Caroline, where the guy recognizes her and raises his eyebrows at her and Max and slips them a business card for what Caroline is pretty sure is an underground porn company. Max, predictably, thinks the whole thing is hilarious, and she leers at Caroline before making her purchase (a variety pack of condoms and a harness, and Caroline is definitely never going to get that image out of her head, not that she’s sure she wants to). They stop by the cupcake shop and find it running with unnerving efficiency in Han and Oleg’s hands. Caroline falls asleep while she waits for Chinese takeout to show up in the evening and when she wakes up Max has invented a butterscotch and maraschino cherry cupcake that makes Sophie’s eyes roll back in her head when she stops by to steal their baked goods and give Max a present both of them refuse to show to Caroline.

They have to work that night, unfortunately. “Happy birthday, Max,” Caroline says on their way over, since it will probably be their last chance before midnight to talk.

“Yeah, sure,” says Max, rolling her eyes, and then: “The brownies were pretty good.” Caroline grins and Max nudges her shoulder while they walk to the diner.

Maybe for her next birthday she’ll get to find out exactly what Max bought that harness for.


End file.
